Caselaw identifiers for oai4courts

This example is the identifier for the majority opinion in NY Times v. Tasini.
It breaks into
scheme:namespace-identifier:local-identifier

-- the scheme oai_lii should be the same for all identifiers, everywhere, and
will eventually
be associated with a series of standards documents and formal xml schemas.

-- the namespace identifier law.cornell.edu is a domain name registered and consistently
maintained by this particular information provider.

-- components of the local-identifier portion are separated by forward slashes.
It is probably
dangerous to think of this as a path-specification per se, since that implies
a hierarchy among
the components that may not be an accurate model of what they represent.

-- the first component of the local-identifier portion is an ISO- two-letter
country code
identifying the country of origin of the opinion

-- the last component of the local-identifier portion is an arbitrary string
corresponding
to a particular item. In this example it is semantically loaded (with a docket
number and
designator indicating the opinion type), but it would not have to be. Some will
prefer
that it not be.

-- the "in between" components of the local-identifier may be used
in any consistent way that
a data provider sees fit. Here we have used "federal/scotus" to identify
the decision as
belonging to the Supreme Court of the United States, a court within the US federal
system. We
might use "federal/usca/8" for the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals,
or "state/ny/appdiv/8" for
the Eighth Appellate Division of the State of New York. In general we think it
preferable
to use this to loosely model or offer hints about the issuing body that created
the document.
Eventually some kind of naming registry will be necessary (as is true of many
other data elements
in this world). We think it is a TERRIBLE idea to use this identifier to model
existing print
publication practices (eg. "oai_lii:bigpublisher.com:us/federal_reporters/f2d/volumeX_pageY"
is really not such a hot idea), but do it if you must.